A puppy dog begging his master for a bone.
“I don’t know her well enough to be able to predict,” I temporized. “She certainly seems fond of you.”
“You know how important this is to me, Johnny.” He sat on the windowsill, precariously poised over Dearborn Street. “Gosh, Johnny, I’ve done some pretty wild things. Sometimes Mom drives me almost crazy. But if April will marry me, I’ll settle down and be as normal and sane as you are. I know that. I can’t wait to have a home and a family of my own. And it will be perfect, because Momma will simply love April, won’t she?”
“Your mother wants the best for you, I’m sure, Jim.”
“See! I knew you’d agree…. Do you think we could have a double wedding, maybe after Christmas?”
“A double wedding?”
“I mean—” he popped off the window ledge and bounced around my office again—“you and Clarice. I know you think she’s a swell kid.”
“I’m not sure she’s my type, Jim. Don’t count on a double wedding.”
“I know you like her a lot,” he crowed. “It takes a lot of courage to buy a ring and offer it to a girl. You’ll see. You’ll be in love yourself soon…Hey, you want to come have a drink with me and celebrate?”
“I’ve got some work I have to finish up.” I gestured at the plans for All Souls.
“I know a swell speak on South State Street,” he grabbed my arm. “It’s hard to get in, but some friends of mine told them that I was all right. They have some really swell strippers.”
“Sounds like fun, but not this afternoon, I’m afraid.”
“I think I’ll head over there anyway,” He bounced toward the door. “I’ve got a lot to celebrate. My life is going to change completely.”
He bounced out of my office. I sat back in my chair, troubled and dejected.
During my long walk from Grant Park to Fullerton and then over to the El for the ride back downtown I worried only about Jim and myself. Had I found the girl of my dreams only to lose her to a friend?
I was confident that I could beat Jim out if I tried, maybe looking back on my spring romanticism in 1925 altogether too confident.
But ought I to try? My romantic notions of “decency” (or “honor” if you will) said I ought not.
I rode back down to the Loop, walked over to the Italian-American offices on Michigan Avenue and reinstated my reservation for a second-class berth on the Rex. The young woman behind the counter looked at me like I was crazy.
Maybe she was right.
25
I saw April next on a black horse in a parade.
I was on the black horse and she was watching the parade surrounded by a crowd of kids.
“Hi, Vangie!” they shouted.
The kids looked like her. Nieces and nephews.
I did not respond or even smile. I resolutely pretended that I did not see or hear them.
That was like pouring gasoline on the fire.
“Vangie,” they shouted again. “Wave back!”
The Black Horse Troop was a rigidly disciplined elite group. Its members did not smile, or wave back, or talk to people on the parade route.
Especially kids. The troop’s principal purpose (unacknowledged but obvious) was to awe kids, even twenty-year-old kids (especially twenty-year-old-girl kids), scare the hell out of them in fact, but delightfully. Kids would dream about us the night of a parade—a solemn, portentous cavalry troop in black uniforms with silver breast-plates, red plumes, carrying big lances and riding jet black horses.
We were the stuff out of which dreams are supposed to be made.
“He smiled,” April shouted as we left her little band behind. “He smiled a little, didn’t he, kids?”
“Yes, Aunt April,” they responded in obedient chorus as my mount and I sauntered out of hearing.
I thought my heart would burst with love for her.
She knew about the parade and about the Black Horse Troop. She was good with kids. She loved parades. She was a grown-up kid herself.
Then I felt sad for her, a little girl only a few years away from her dolls, she was trying to hold on to the joys of childhood and yet fulfill the responsibilities of an adult woman—an impossible task.
Poor kid. But I would love her all my life. And make her happier than she could believe possible.
When I came back from Rome.
She did love parades! I knew she would. One more love we have in common.
I had been a parade freak as long as I could remember. I think I inherited this obsession from my mother. Though she was the least romantic of women, she took me to every parade in Chicago when I was a toddler.
“Look, Jackie,” she’d whisper in mock fright, “here comes the Black Horse Troop! Aren’t they wonderful fierce now? Sure, you wouldn’t want them to be on the other side in a war, would you now?”
Bug-eyed, I agreed that I wanted them on my side.
The troop rarely led the parades. When the city was honoring a visiting dignitary, they rode in front of his carriage, or later his car. On holiday parades, they came toward the end, both to keep little kids anxious as to whether they’d ever come and because the contrast between the scores of bands, noisy and often ragged, and the solemn troop was awesome.
That’s what we were designed to be—awesome. At least to kids.
As a bug-eyed kid, I had worshiped these giant men on their horses—which just maybe came straight from hell. As an adult—or maybe, like my love of 1925, a grown-up kid—I reveled in the worship of bug-eyed kids.
Headquarters Troop, 106th Cavalry (Illinois), we were, truth to tell, not much good at anything except parades. We were allegedly an “elite” unit. What else would you be if you wore silver armor and carried massive lances and rode big jet-black horses? Heavy cavalry, right?
Except the machine gun had made cavalry, heavy or light, obsolete in the first months of 1914. Neither the Uhlans nor the Bengal Lancers nor the Zouaves were of much use in trench war against barbed wire and machine gun emplacements. (In 1939, Polish lancers did charge German tanks, proving their courage if not their prudence.)
In 1940 the Black Horse Troop was told that it was now an armored reconnaissance unit, assigned to exploring the terrain ahead of the advancing 33rd Division (Illinois) in Jeeps and light tanks.
Naturally, we didn’t have any Jeeps or light tanks, not that they would have done us much good in New Guinea anyway.
So Headquarters Troop (there were no other troops) was fairy-story cavalry, the only kind of soldier that I ever wanted to be after I was discharged from Camp Leavenworth.
Socialite cavalry veterans had organized the unit after the Civil War, veterans whom I suspect never charged a Confederate earthwork. It enabled them to maintain military titles (most of the troop were officers, I was a first lieutenant in 1925), ride horses in parades, stage a formal ball every year, and field a polo team.
I loved horses as much as I loved parades. Dad kept a horse behind our house on West End until 1920. When I was a little boy, he used to take me riding with him. I learned to ride a horse of my own when I was nine. I tried to enlist in a cavalry unit in 1918, but there were no openings and such was my patriotic zeal that I wanted to be a soldier fighting the Hun even if it meant joining the infantry.
So, when I graduated from Armour I asked Dad to pull a few strings and get me a commission in the National Guard and as assignment to the Black Horse Troop.
“All right,” Dad grunted, “but I won’t pay your hospital bills if you’re a big enough damn fool to play polo.”
“I’m not that big a fool,” I reassured him. “You can get hurt with those polo mallets.”
My responsibilities required that I spend one Saturday afternoon a month with the horses, who were quartered then in the armory in Towertown near the Water Tower, and participate in one of every three parades. There were more troopers than there were horses so we took turns riding in parades, a column of forty-eight two-abreast troopers, solemn
and implacable behind an officer dressed so splendidly that you would think he was at least a field marshal.
“Gilbert and Sullivan soldiers,” April told me at supper the next night. Then, noting the hurt expression on my face, she quickly added, “I love Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Our only role”—I tried to sound self-deprecating—“is to cause delighted shivers in little kids.”
“Well, I certainly shivered when I saw those grim men on their big black horses, riding down the street as if they had conquered the whole city and everyone in it.”
“Sometimes we may even conquer a few hearts among the maidens of the city.”
“Not if you don’t ever smile. You’re so grim I think you’d scare most maidens away.”
“Not the brave ones.”
Jim broke into our banter, anxiously directing the conversation back to himself and a prank he had pulled on some stuffy traders at the Board.
He wasn’t aware of the sexual undercurrent in our conversation. He merely wanted to keep himself the center of the party.
Clarice knew what was happening, however. She smiled faintly at our exchange and at Jim’s intervention. There was no ill will in her smile. Rather she seemed content that her friend was as interested in me as I in her.
Poor Clarice. Was she a doomed soul even then? Perhaps. I was so worried about Jim and so frustrated by the conflict within me between desire and “decency” that I paid no attention to Clarice.
If someone had asked about her then, I would have said that a woman so beautiful could not help but have a happy life.
I felt a little ill at ease in my first month in the troop. The North Shore aristocrats (Protestant) who were the bulk of its members were not my kind of people. They were mildly displeased with me when I pleaded that my professional responsibilities made it impossible for me to try out for the polo team (an untruth of which April Cronin would have thoroughly disapproved). But the son of a politician can get along anywhere and with anyone.
The annual formal ball after Labor Day was, I’ve always thought, the most elaborate and colorful military ball in human history—even if we were useless militarily. As we rode back up Michigan Avenue after the parade that spring of 1925, I proudly pictured the attention April would attract at the ball at the end of the summer; the vapid North Shore young women would be no match for her South Side Irish vitality.
The Michigan Avenue Bridge had been opened only five years before and Pine Street above the bridge had only then become North Michigan. The Drake Hotel, at Oak Street, new at that time, gave a hint of the splendor the avenue would eventually attain. In 1925, Tribune Tower and the Wrigley Building stood as Art Deco sentinels at the opposite end. The rest of the neighborhood was a backwater between the Loop and the Gold Coast, deteriorating two and three flats, small factories, and two breweries.
I didn’t pay much attention to the physical environment, however, as we cantered back to the armory. I worried about April. Or rather, I worried about her and me. She was not pretending not to like me. In fact, she seemed unafraid of violating the strictest of the canons of modesty to make her feelings clear.
She must know I felt the same way. The flames of desire were patently dancing back and forth between us. Moreover, we liked one another. Was this not how young people were supposed to feel when they were about to fix on a choice for a permanent partner?
Yet what would she make of my departing, almost as soon as I had met her, for Rome? Would she think I was seeking only a transient flirtation?
How would I explain to her later—if I were given an opportunity to explain or if there was any point in an explanation?
I was at least sensitive enough to know a woman would not like to be told that I was giving my best friend the first chance at her.
How could I explain my trip at the farewell supper that Jim had set up for the next (Sunday) night?
Jim had arranged for the reservations at the College Inn and then at the Lincoln Garden’s Cafe. I was not a fan of farewell parties. They brought out the morose side of my personality, a side I did not like. But April wanted a party, she had insisted the night the four of us went to the movies at the Oriental Theater. That meant there would be a farewell party.
The film we had seen was Tumbleweed with William S. Hart and Barbara Bedford—tickets bought beforehand by Jim, naturally.
Each of the four of us had a different style of watching the film—Clarice in dead silence; Jim with guffaws at the broad comedy (Hart throwing the villain into a horse trough); I with cynical comments (noting that Hart seemed more heavily corseted than Barbara Bedford); and April with total abandon to the story (when she was not shushing with some asperity my cynicism).
She cried at the lovely old couple, stamped her feet at the villain’s cruelty, muttered angrily when Hart and Miss Beford permitted their romance to go astray, clutched my hand as Hart galloped through the opening rush into the Cherokee Strip, screamed in horror when it seemed that Hart would be killed, cheered wildly when he finally disarmed the bad guys, and wept yet again when he proposed to Miss Bedford.
In the process, she disposed of all of her two pounds of Fanny Mae’s and most of mine.
“I loved it,” she cooed happily as we walked out of the Oriental.
“You ate the candy,” I said, “the way the man in the newsreel eats everything.”
One of the segments had been about a certain Nick Tartaglione, allegedly the world’s champion eater.
“You only noticed the bathing-beauty contest,” she sniffed.
“None of them were as pretty as you and Clarice.”
“You’ll forget us after five minutes on that mean old boat. That reminds me…Jimmy, don’t you think we ought to have a farewell party for Vangie?”
“Great idea!” Jim clapped his hands. “We’ll go hear his friend Louis Armstrong play!”
So it was settled. Jim and April both loved parties.
I did too, but…
As we rode into the armory, I perceived that the dilemma was insoluble. I would have to run the risk of losing April if Jim was to be given a fair opportunity to win her.
Maybe I’d be able to explain somehow when I returned from Rome. But April did not seem to be the kind of young woman who would take kindly to any excuse for my having spurned her, however temporarily.
I rode home on the open upper deck of a Washington Boulevard bus, depressed and moody. I had backed myself into a corner in which love and honor (“decency,” as I called the latter) were in immutable conflict.
A romantic trap, fashioned for himself by an incorrigible romantic—one on a big (and very gentle) black horse.
I would never get credit for my sacrifice, I told myself morosely. If Jim married April, he would not realize that I had made it possible for him to pursue and win her. If I married her after she had turned Jim down, he would never forgive me. More mature men than Jim maintained a lifelong grudge against successful rivals.
“Don’t expect to receive credit for doing the decent thing,” Dad had often said. “Not in this world anyway.”
I did expect credit, but I didn’t think it very likely that I would get any.
“Another rhapsody in blue,” I said to her when Jim and I joined her and Clarice at the College Inn for the farewell party.
(Isham Jones and his band were a fixture at the College Inn in those days and his hit song that year was “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” appropriate sentiments for the party.)
“A response to a concerto in silver and black.” She shook my hand firmly. “Hey, doesn’t that sound like a wonderful title? ‘Concerto in silver and black’? If I had any talent at composition, I might even write it.”
“I’m sure you do have the talent.”
“Not what my composition teacher said…My nieces and nephews were terribly impressed. They said they’d sleep more peacefully at night with you in the Army. No danger of Amd el Krim and his desert warriors taking over Chicago.”
April an
d Clarice and I began to hum “One Alone” from The Desert Song.
“Hey, you guys,” Jim protested. “Don’t embarrass me. Everyone is looking at us.”
We stopped singing.
“I have collected affidavits from my nieces and nephews,” my love continued, “that you most certainly did smile at us, only a little smile, but a smile just the same…”
“Everyone smiles at clowns,” I responded. “Especially silly clowns with very funny South Side faces.”
“Will you have to face the firing squad for breaking the rules?”
“You or me. I think it had better be you.”
Jim interrupted by producing an enormous flask from his coat pocket and pouring us all a drink.
It was first-rate gin.
Perhaps I should explain to those who don’t remember Prohibition that almost no one in Chicago took the Volstead Act seriously—even though the headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the power behind the act, was in nearby Evanston. There was not a good restaurant in the city that objected to patrons bringing their own hooch to dinner. Routinely, restaurant managers arranged for empty glasses on every table. If the patrons did not fill them at the beginning of dinner, waiters silently removed them.
The evening was fraught with cross-purposes. Jim was trying to impress the young women with his “contacts” at the College Inn and the Lincoln Garden’s Cafe. April and I were trying to arrange an agenda for a summer in which I would be absent. Clarice watched in silent amusement.
Jim had provided corsages and more candy for the girls, buttonhole carnations for himself and me, and the best seats in the house. He was beside himself with happiness at the elegance of the party and as determined that we should enjoy ourselves as a kid who is sharing a new toy with his closest playmates.
“Sometimes,” I said to her, “we bring the captured maidens and matrons to a military ball at the Drake in early September. It’s a very fancy night.”
“Do you wear silver armor?”
“It’s hard to dance in silver armor, but we do look splendid in black and gold.”
“Elite maidens and matrons.” She turned up her nose in disdain. “No South Side Irish with apple color in their cheeks need apply.”
Younger Than Springtime Page 26
